What China’s new red dawn means for Hong Kong

China has once again moved to tighten its control over the former British territory and global financial centre. What will remain of the old Hong Kong’s attractions?

Martin Lee
Martin Lee: the father of democracy now faces jail
(Image credit: © REUTERS / Alamy)

What’s happened?

Last month China’s ultimate decision-making body, the Standing Committee of its rubber-stamp Parliament, passed sweeping reforms that further strengthen Beijing’s tight political control over Hong Kong. The measures slash the proportion of elected seats in the territory’s legislative assembly from 50% to 22%, and require all would-be MPs – as well as all other public officials – to be vetted for their “patriotism” by a pro-Beijing committee. The move prompted a further wave of arrests and convictions of dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists. One of seven people convicted last week – over a peaceful demonstration in 2019 – was Martin Lee, the 82-year-old barrister known as the “father of democracy”. Lee once helped draft the Basic Law that underpinned Hong Kong’s relative freedoms after 1997. He now faces up to five years in jail for unlawful assembly.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.